Posted on 07/18/2014 4:30:41 AM PDT by servo1969
One of the classic signs of serious mental illness is “inappropriate affect.” In this context, “affect” is the emotional face we present to the world. To the extent that a narcissist’s only emotional fixed point is his own need, most of a narcissists affects are actually faked, but that doesn’t mean they’re inappropriate.
The narcissist knows that it would harm his best interests if he were to giggle uncontrollably at a funeral or pick a fist fight with a patient in hospice. Normal people wouldn’t even think of doing such things (outside of the comedy universe), but a narcissist might want to do both, only to stop himself for fear of breaking cover.
Sometimes, though, narcissists, and other sick people, are so disconnected from reality — including their reality of their own best interests in a given situation — that they can no longer stop themselves from presenting an entirely wrong emotional face to the public. That completely disconnected emotional presentation goes by the shorthand title of “inappropriate affect.”
One of the major subsets of inappropriate affect is “inappropriate laughter.” There are seldom any good excuses for behavior. Here’s one short, computer-generated, somewhat repetitive list of some of the major causes behind inappropriate laughter:
Causes of Inappropriate laughter:
The following medical conditions are some of the possible causes of Inappropriate laughter. There are likely to be other possible causes, so ask your doctor about your symptoms.
- Drug intoxication
- Substance abuse
- Dementia
- Temporal lobe injury
- Alcohol intoxication
Common Causes: Inappropriate laughter
Some of the possible common medical causes of Inappropriate laughter may include:
- Drug intoxication
- Substance abuse
- Dementia
- Temporal lobe injury
Other Causes: Inappropriate laughter
Some of the less common causes of Inappropriate laughter may include:
I don’t mean to write a psychological treatise here. I freely admit I’m not qualified to do so, other than having the dubious pleasure of knowing over the years people suffering from narcissism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, dementia, etc. Instead, this information is a set-up to the fact that Barack Obama has been behaving very peculiarly lately, with the most obvious manifestation of this peculiar behavior being inappropriate laughter.
Think back to his meeting with Texas Governor Rick Perry regarding the tens of thousands of children storming the border. This flood of humanity has been overwhelming resources and bringing both crime and disease in its wake (and that’s not even counting the crimes visited upon the children themselves, especially sexual crimes).
Even if Obama’s ideology means that he is celebrating the breakdown of America’s border, a high-functioning narcissist would recognize that the public doesn’t want to see the American president laughing about a man-created disaster our southern border. Laughter, however, is precisely what the president offered to the American people:
Looking at that picture, the first thought a mentally healthy person would have is “There’s something very wrong going on there.” (As for the laughter from Obama’s entourage, we know he surrounds himself by “yes” men, so it’s not unreasonable for those same “yes” men to laugh when the boss laughs, no matter the absence of actual humor.)
It would be easy enough to pass off what happened in the Texas meeting if it weren’t for the fact that Obama was at it again just today. This morning, news broke that Malaysian Airlines, which already lost a plane with all its crew and passengers just a few months ago, once again lost a plane.
This time, if reports are accurate, pro-Russian forces in the Ukraine deliberately shot down a passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Malaya. All 295 people aboard the plane died, including 23 Americans.
No matter how one looks at the crash, it’s no laughing matter. There’s the human tragedy of so many deaths, there’s the national tragedy of so many American deaths, and there’s the international concern of Russian forces shooting down planes. Putin may have bitten off more than he can chew with his Ukraine adventure, but the fact remains that it’s a big deal when the Russian military kills close to 300 people, many of them Americans, and apparently does so intentionally.
So what does Obama do in the face of this big and serious deal? He gives the event a cursory 40 second salute and then, as if by the click of switch, reverts to his prepared remarks, smiling and cracking jokes:
The videos currently available don’t quite capture Obama’s bizarre emotional transition. It remains to the press, many of whom are or have been Obama supporters, to paint a picture of his emotional distance:
Obama, in sum: A plane crashed. It may be tragic. We’re trying to see if US citizens were on board. Hey, great to be in Delaware!
— Matt Viser (@mviser) July 17, 2014
The President of the United States is at a fundraiser?
— stuart stevens (@stuartpstevens) July 17, 2014
Even Piers Morgan (Piers Morgan!!) was shocked by Obama’s cavalier attitude towards a human tragedy and international problem:
President Obama massively dropped the ball just now. 23 Americans killed and he says ‘it looks like a terrible tragedy’ then back to jokes? — Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 17, 2014
Let me help, Mr President – it IS a terrible tragedy, and it’s more probably mass murder of your citizens & many other nations’ citizens.
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 17, 2014
Singer Josh Groban added his own two cents to Morgan’s comments:
Just awful > Rt @joshgroban @piersmorgan I totally agree. Bad prep. I was shocked. — Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 17, 2014
Obama’s bizarre quips and laughter have also surfaced in connection with an increasingly voiced concern that he has created a serious constitutional crisis by ignoring Congress’s laws and creating his own. The preceding 43 presidents, if they were challenged on the ground that they violated their constitutional oath, would strike back with carefully prepared remarks justifying their conduct and pointing to authority.
That’s not what Obama has done. Instead, as Rich Lowry details, he’s once again engaged in peculiar and inappropriate flights of “humor”:
President Barack Obama styles himself a wit, and some of his best material lately has to do with his abuse of his powers.
“Middle-class families can’t wait for Republicans in Congress to do stuff,” Obama told a crowd on the Georgetown Waterfront on July 1. “So sue me.” Hilarity ensued.
He cracked them up in Austin last week. “You hear some of them,” he said, referring to Republicans, “‘sue him,’ ‘impeach him.’ Really? Really? For what? You’re going to sue me for doing my job?”
[snip]
It takes a truly blithe spirit to play the constitutional deformation of his office, and the ensuing congressional reaction, for laughs.
Once again, rational people must look at Obama’s misplaced jocularity and think to themselves “There’s something very wrong happening there.”
Going back to that laundry list, above, detailing the most common reasons for inappropriate laughter, it seems to me that there are only a few we can discount immediately, such as Tourette syndrome, Angelman syndrome, tic disorders, etc.
Others raise themselves as real possibilities. Take substance abuse, for example. Given Obama’s youthful problems with marijuana and cocaine, it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that, as the stresses of his office pile up (including the stress attendant upon setting up an imperial presidency), Obama is self-medicating. There are also perennial rumors that both Obamas, Michelle and Barack, drink too much.
If there’s no substance abuse, Obama’s bizarre behavior could stem from an organic disorder. This disorder could run the gamut from dementia and schizophrenia to a brain tumor.
Or, of course, and perhaps most likely, we could just be seeing the grandiose stylings of a malignant narcissist drunk with power. Surrounded by his flunkies and acolytes, enjoying the permanent job security that comes with his race, and delighting in the downfall of a country he hates (his own, as it happens), Obama may perceive himself as a man without any of the limitations that confine ordinary people. Nothing can touch him.
Regardless of the cause, when the president of what still is, just barely, the most powerful nation in the world begins to behave abnormally in public, people have to start worrying. Whether our president is under the influence, crazy, ill, or just power mad, we Americans are suddenly finding ourselves in exactly the same position as Europeans of old who suffered through the madness brought about by hereditary monarchs in the grip of megalomanias that resulted from everything from inbreeding, to syphilis, to the mental corruption of absolute power.
UPDATE: I know I’m on the right track when I discover that Iowahawk is on the same track:
Come back Nero, all is forgiven
It’s a nervous reaction ... and it occurs when he is faced with his own inability to comprehend what goes on around him.
Of course it is more evident ALL the time...the guy is OUT OF HIS DEPTH!
Somebody needs to shave this guys head the rest of the way down and look for 6s.
Or it’s just an obnoxious character trait.
He has no interest in being President. He just wants to be a celebrity.
It is possible, even probable, they shot down a plane intentionally, but thought it was a Ukrainian military plane, not a civilian airliner.
We did much the same thing ourselves a while back with a civilian Iranian airliner.
It's really difficult for me to think of an upside for Putin from this plane being shot down, therefore hard to see why he'd authorize it. It a disaster for him.
Inappropriate reaction? Would that include coming out all smiles, waving and strutting down to the podium for a press conference about an airliner that appears to have been shot down?
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing yesterday.
he’s a low level minion of the devil.
He is far from smart enough to be the devil himself.
A good comment on the article-
Kathy from Kansas says
July 17, 2014 at 11:04 pm
If the majority of Americans didn’t compulsively turn up their noses at the issue of abortion (“don’t want to think about it, don’t talk to me about it”), they might have taken note of Obama’s beyond-extreme behavior on that issue, and hence might have thought twice about electing him in the first place. As an Illinois state senator, Obama vigorously advocated outright infanticide of babies born alive after failed late-term abortions. Obama’s reasoning was that if a woman has signed up for an abortion, she has the right to a dead baby, no ifs, ands or buts. If the baby has the audacity to actually survive the procedure, then we must kill it, kill it already!
People should have been appalled to learn that state senator Obama not only voted for keeping infanticide legal, but he was the one and only member of the Illinois senate who actually took to the senate floor and gave a speech defending the practice. This is more hard core than even Hillary Clinton and Barbara Boxer, who, when the issue came up in the U.S. Senate, drew the line at not killing babies once they’re actually out of the womb. Not so Obama.
That one thing, all by itself, sent chills up my spine back in 2008. I knew instantly that Obama was one very cold fish. Zero empathy. Zero sense of justice for the powerless, whatever his fancy rhetoric to the contrary. Zero normal, tender human feeling for the little ones of our own kind. The man is a freak and a monster. If he has no protective instinct toward the small and helpless, why would anyone think he’d have any protective instinct toward the great mass of Americans? If he could so easily dispose of the lives of those who are totally innocent, why should we suppose he would have any concern at all for the lives of you and me, especially if we are a nuisance to him, i.e., by opposing him? This is the last sort of person on earth that should ever be given any power over the lives of other people.
Oh, how I tried to warn people! But they would not believe me when I told them about Obama and the born-alive babies. When I gave them links to solid documentation of it, they refused to look into them. They did not want to know. They blamed the messenger and put their heads in the sand. The “cool” people were all voting for Obama, and they were going to get on that bus no matter what.
As for your thoughts on amoral vs. immoral: While I do think Obama is mentally disturbed, sometimes mental illness overlaps with evil. (I think Scott Peck has written about this, if I’m remembering right.) I always think it’s worth noting that Obama’s guiding light, Saul Alinsky, dedicated his nasty, pernicious little book to Lucifer, “the first rebel.”
Those two things — the born-alive babies he wanted killed, and learning his community-organizing tactics from a guy who admired Satan — tell me everything I need to know about Obama. And this information was out there in 2007 and 2008. Those of us who were paying attention predicted that he would be cold, capricious and tyrannical. He’s doing exactly what malignant narcissists do.
The harsh reality of becoming a non relevant entity is starting to wear on the fragile tissue known as a brain.
I think you can add a hole to that list of causes.
Look, senators are blowhards which is why we don’t usually elect then president. Obama was a nothing and a terrible mistake has been made. His election.
He manifests lots of foolish behavior which one sees in society these days.
Think about the fact he is the least experienced person to be president in our lifetimes maybe in history.
Holy carp!
Lack of empathy. Other people are no more significant than cardboard cutouts to such people.
This allows them to calmly discuss the enslavement or killing of millions when planning for the future.
And we seem to have one of those as president. God help us.
Ahh, but the strawberries that’s... that’s where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist, and I’d have produced that key if they hadn’t of pulled the Caine out of action. I, I, I know now they were only trying to protect some fellow officers...
Obama is laughing because his side is winning and winning with little to no opposition. He has transformed America and it is beautiful (the wreckage) in his sight.
Do we need another sign?
Awesome post. Love your tagline....you watch “Talking” too?
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